Fileformat awareness, finally!
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007I’ve been screaming from the top of my lungs for years: why do companies accept proprietary fileformats? Why do they accept a vendor lock-in for something as basic as your own data? I’ve seen many clients trying to keep up a heterogeneous computing environment just to prevent a vendor lock-in. Good thing but on the other hand all documentation, financial information, reports etc. are all in a proprietary format without anybody caring. I really don’t understand why you want your own data being held for ransom in some purposely undocumented fileformat. Fileformats are considered trade secrets by manufacturers, but should be regarded as a noose around your neck.
Some time ago there was the good news that the Dutch government adopts the open document format, now the Norwegian government does the same. Let’s hope many more governments, the EU & companies worldwide will finally wake up and smell the coffee. Are there any companies out there migrating to the open document format anyway?